Too much ballet these days is top-heavy with narrative that would be better served by the spoken word than it is by body language. And too few choreographers know how to engage with music, rather than using it as a mere sonic backdrop. So what a blessed relief it was to encounter Pam Tanowitz’s utterly delightful Pastoral, which is guilty of neither of these failings. I enjoyed it so much that I was compelled to go back and see it again, at my own considerable expense, two days later.

Pastoral lasts for an hour or so, but seems to ignore tick-tock time: it is both simple and complex, naive and sophisticated. The score by Caroline Shaw plays with extracts from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, its themes played repetitively by clarinet, horn, oboe and bassoon live in the pit, mixed with snatches of full orchestral recordings, whistles, hums and even briefly the rumble of urban traffic – akin to the way that we experience music in our heads. The light on the stage passes imperceptibly through........

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